As Trump staggers to the polls, Americans yearning for change prepare to say ‘enough’

The British politician Enoch Powell, reflecting on his political demise, noted that all political careers end in failure. The thought must have occurred to Donald Trump as he entered the last days of his final campaign, dragging himself around from rally to rally in once-solid Republican states that the party is in danger of losing to a Democratic wave in the midterms next Tuesday, 3 November.The bluster is still there, but the croaking voice and the evident decline, mental and physical, betray an 80-year-old showing his age as he takes the stage once more to tell ever-thinner crowds that he is the most successful president in history.He frequently lapses into his obsession with the construction of a White House ballroom and the reflecting pool that “goes all the way from Washington to Lincoln” and whose renovation he botched. His other obsession, weirdly, is the buttocks of Senator Jon Husted, who is fighting for his Ohio Senate seat against Sherrod Brown.On Sunday Trump added rapper Nicki Minaj’s “beautiful ass” to the list of backsides he appreciates.The truth is that he has failed miserably – in the disastrous Iran war, in the tariffs, in bringing down costs, in ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in lowering the deficit. It is hard to fully capture the epic destruction he has wrought. He has picked fights with allies like Canada and Denmark while being led into two wars by Bibi Netanyahu and sucking up to Vladimir Putin, who his envoy, Steve Witkoff, last week described as a “humanitarian”.Trump has kept two promises – to pass an enormous tax cut for the wealthy and to stem the tide of immigrants across the southern border, but in so doing has unleashed a Gestapo-like force of masked men hunting brown people on America’s streets.The one thing he has succeeded with is adding several billion dollars to his and his family’s wealth, enriching his cronies and opening a free-for-all for grifters that would have embarrassed Mobutu Sese Seko. He has turned cruelty, avarice and dishonesty from private vices into the public creed of a decadent ruling class.Next Tuesday, the day before South Africans go to the polls in local government elections, the American people will have an opportunity to deliver a verdict on all this, and it doesn’t look good for Trump.History comes full circleFormer president Barack Obama jumped into the fray last Saturday, telling an excited crowd in Cleveland, Ohio, that “after two years of chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence, the likes of which we have not seen in the modern era, you get a chance to say ‘enough is enough’.”If Obama’s speeches have an added edge, it is because there is a curious sense of history coming full circle. After Obama became America’s first Black president in 2009, it was Trump who became the loudest voice of the backlash, demanding that he produce his birth certificate to prove he was not born in Kenya.And it was Obama’s very public mocking of Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2011 that, by many accounts, hardened Trump’s resolve and set him on his improbable path to the presidency. His guiding principle in his first term was to undo everything his predecessor had achieved, including tearing up the nuclear deal with Iran. That, arguably, set in motion the chain of events that led to the current war, the biggest mess of his presidency.At that dinner 15 years ago Obama joked that a Trump presidency would “bring some change to the White House”, and showed a mock-up of the White House turned into a gaudy Trump hotel and casino, with “TRUMP” in big gold letters.On Saturday, Obama returned to that theme, mocking Trump for being “very focused on home renovations” and landing the line of the campaign: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”It clearly got under Trump’s skin. Two days later, heading to a rally in Mississippi, he was still fuming: “For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president.”The Democratic podcasters at Pod Save America joked that Trump’s campaign slogan should have been: “Let them eat cheesecake.”Former US president Barack Obama speaks during a midterm campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan, on 24 October. (Photo: Ari Saperstein / EPA) The odds are with the DemocratsThere is a sour mood in the country, and much of the anger is directed at the president. His approval rating has fallen to between 32% and 36% in the latest CNN and New York Times/Siena polls, the lowest of his second term. Only 23% approve of his handling of inflation, and 27% of the economy.Even though Trump’s name is not on any ballot on 3 November, the election is a referendum on his presidency, a fact which has been underscored by the decision to put Trump front and centre of the campaign despite his dismal poll ratings.Independents and young voters have turned against him, Hispanic voters are furious at ICE’s immigration crackdown, and the Farm Belt is hurting from tariffs and from the diesel and fertiliser costs driven up by the deeply unpopular Iran war. Everyone is feeling the pinch. Even immigration, his signature issue, is no longer working for him.Poll guru Nate Silver’s forecast gives the Democrats more than a 90% chance of winning the House of Representatives and about a 75% chance of taking the Senate.Democrats are nervous, not wanting to have their hearts broken again by trusting opinion polls, against glass-half-full Republicans, who believe the polls are underestimating them, as they did in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and that their voters will come home.US President Donald Trump gestures to reporters to be quiet during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on 20 October 2026. (Photo: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images) While the Democrats are favoured to win the House, the Senate is far from a done deal. Because Senators have a six-year term, a third of the seats are up this year. With Republicans holding a 53-47 majority, Democrats need a net gain of four to take the majority.North Carolina, where former governor Roy Cooper leads comfortably, looks safe. But the other targets are states Trump won in 2024 by between 11 and 16 points. Remarkably, Democrats are now level or ahead in several of them: Sherrod Brown leads in Ohio, the race in Texas is a dead heat, Josh Turek is narrowly ahead in Iowa, and Mary Peltola is favoured in Alaska.Maine, which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, should have been an easy pick-up. Instead, the Democratic nominee, the charismatic Graham Platner, withdrew in July after sexual assault allegations, which he denies. His somewhat less-charismatic replacement, Troy Jackson, is now tied with Susan Collins, one of the last remaining Republican “moderates”, who has won every Senate election in the state since 1996.There are also seats held by Democrats that could flip to the Republicans. The most vulnerable is Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, a feisty and personable candidate, has faced an avalanche of big-donor and Aipac money and Islamophobic attacks. The smears have hurt and he holds a narrow lead in a state where the Democratic candidate for governor is 10 points in front.If the polls are out by just a few percent, the Democrats’ hopes for the Senate will evaporate. But if they move a few more points in the other direction, the party and affiliated independents could capture deep-red seats such as Nebraska, South Carolina and Kansas (which has not elected a Democrat since 1932).The Republicans, shocked by what their own internal polls are telling them, on Monday night sent Trump out to campaign in Mississippi, a state that he won by 23 points, but where an outstanding black lawyer, Scott Colom, has crept within a few points of the incumbent Republican.Candidate quality versus big moneyOn the plus side for the Democrats, the much-heralded fight between centrists and the left has not materialised. Facing what they see as an existential threat to democracy, they have closed ranks.The Democrats have fielded some high-quality candidates. Jon Ossoff’s strong defence of his Senate seat in Georgia has made him a likely presidential contender. In Texas there is James Talarico, a seminarian and state legislator who talks about faith as fluently as any evangelical. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton, pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in suburban Kansas City, is running neck and neck with Republican Senator Roger Marshall, a former physician who sued his own patients when they couldn’t pay.Trump has gone after Talarico personally. He called him a “FRAUD” who believes in “six genders” and an “insult to Jesus” for his refusal to victimise transgender people.Other outsiders with compelling life stories running in Red states include Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik native American who is running on the slogan “fish, family and freedom” in Alaska, and the wheelchair-bound Paralympian gold medallist Josh Turek in Iowa.The Republicans have a huge advantage in money. According to the New York Times, Elon Musk has donated $450-million to the party this cycle. He has focused close to $190-million into the Texas Senate race alone to rescue Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton, arguably the sleaziest and most corrupt politician in the US who is not a member of the Trump family.But the cash advantage is balanced out by the poor quality of many of the candidates and the lack of a coherent message other than attacking their opponents.Which brings us to Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio. His campaign still has an ad up attacking his opponent, Amy Acton, who was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of 10 to 12. He was indicted in 1978, skipped his court date, spent years as a fugitive, and has since died.Ramaswamy’s team tracked down Acton’s estranged mother living in a car at the back of a church yard and filmed her in an ad calling her daughter a liar. Acton had not seen or spoken to her mother for 48 years after she took the stepfather’s side against Acton and her brother, and later lit up out of the state with her husband.Going after a rape survivor was too disgusting even for some Republicans, and Mike de Wine, the current governor of Ohio, called on Ramaswamy to take it down. But Trump praised it as a great ad and told Ramaswamy to “ride with it”, while Vice-President JD Vance told his party to stop “whining about an advertisement” and win the race.US Vice-President JD Vance participates in a ‘fireside chat’ during a Turning Points USA event in the Akins Ford Arena on the campus of the University of Georgia on 14 April 2026. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) The Cook Political Report, the gold standard of election ratings, has moved the race from a toss-up to leaning towards Acton.Little the Republicans have done this cycle can match the hounding of the Somali American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose Washington home was raided this month as part of what the Justice Department calls a criminal investigation, reportedly into immigration fraud. Trump has revived the long-debunked claim that she once married her brother, saying she could go to jail or be deported, and kept up his long-running vendetta against Somalis, whom he has called “garbage”. Omar has had to move out of her Washington home because of death threats.Never admit defeatAdding to the anxiety of many Democrats is a deep and well-founded fear that, even if the vote proceeds smoothly and they win, Trump will find a way to cheat, overturn the result or at the very least instigate chaos.Throughout his public life, Trump has followed the playbook of his mentor Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1950s Red Scare and a toxic presence in American politics for three decades. Cohn’s rules were simple: attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and always claim victory, never admit defeat.Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer handling dozens of election-related cases, says Trump is using the power of the federal government to threaten states, intimidate election officials and disenfranchise voters. Most of the administration’s attempts to take control of the election machinery have failed in the courts. About 26 federal judges have thrown out its demands for state voter rolls. But it persists.In California, the Justice Department has demanded that election officials set aside the ballots of 20,000 voters it says are likely to be non-citizens, based on a federal database match the state says is unreliable, and has warned officials that they could be prosecuted if they count them.In Alaska, Trump ordered the Justice Department to sue to block certification of the Senate result if the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, loses. The reason: there is another Dan Sullivan on the ballot.A structural electionBut even if all these obstacles are overcome and a Democratic Congress is sworn in on 3 January, that is when the next phase of the struggle begins: holding the administration to account for what it has done over the past two years, preparing for the presidential election in 2028 and preparing a blueprint for change.If the angst of Trump’s second, far more radical term has produced anything, it is the realisation that, whoever the Democratic candidate is, there can be no going back to normal. In 2019 Joe Biden assured wealthy donors that under him “nothing would fundamentally change”. That promise will not wash again.There is something structural about this moment: a yearning for real change, a desire to take on not just the political class but a dysfunctional system that has created so much wealth for the few and left so many behind.Though Trump has two more years in office, a succession struggle for the leadership of the MAGA movement is already under way.In their new book, End Times Fascism, Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein describe the coalition at the top of MAGA, as distinct from its rank and file, as three groups: tech billionaires (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others), religious fanatics and ethno-nationalists.Some prominent MAGA figures have already broken with Trump: the influential broadcaster Tucker Carlson over the Iran war, and the former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.Carlson has made no secret of his preference for Vance, who has been valiantly trying to fill Trump’s large shoes. But for all his efforts, Vance is mean and charmless and lacks the charisma the movement demands of its leader. Marco Rubio, whom Carlson’s camp sees as Vance’s chief rival, is smarter, but for all his willingness to go along with Trump, he is not, at heart, a MAGA man.Global impactThe devastating impact Trump and Maga have had on global politics, including emboldening white nationalists in South Africa, means next week’s result should concern everyone.A narrative has taken hold that the extreme right is unstoppable as it sweeps across Latin America, Western Europe and Japan.But this weekend, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s narrow defeat of the Maga copycat Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the victory of Serbia’s young people over Aleksandar Vučić, suddenly opened up a different possibility: the end of an era, and perhaps the birth of something new.Today, Trump’s great friend, Netanyahu, is fighting for his political life, and the question is whether the soft-spoken former army chief Gadi Eisenkot can finally bring his career to an end.If Hungary, Brazil and Serbia have lit the way, and Israel offers a glimmer of hope, the US midterms could prove one of the most consequential elections in a generation. But the battle is far from over, and in parts of the world it is only just beginning.And a day later, another era will end: that of the ANC as we know it. With luck, this too will open the door for the kind of renewal and reinvention of politics that is stirring elsewhere in the world. DM